Advances in health care have helped to dramatically increase the lifespan of patients and their quality of life through the development of more effective treatments, medication, and medical technologies. However, one of the leading causes of medical patient readmission and patient fatalities is accidental patient or caregiver non-compliance with medication administration. Many patients often forget to take their medication, take too many doses of their medication, take their medication in an incorrect interval, or take the wrong medication. Additionally, patients do not keep a log of their medication intake. Incorrect administration of medication in the prescribed method can lead to serious medical complications, higher medical costs, and death. Most patients do not even keep a good medication intake log to help provide assistance in medical diagnosis. Even when patients use calendars, a caregiver, their own memory or other methods to help remind them to take a particular medication on time, there is no easy and automated way for them to verify if they are taking the correct medication or dosage. There is no easy way for a health care provider to track if their patients are taking their medication in the manner that they were prescribed. There is no easy and automated way for healthcare providers to immediately modify or cancel medication orders or for pharmaceutical manufactures to recall a medication after patient or caregivers have possession of the medication. Also, there is no easy or automated way for healthcare providers to alert patients who have taken a recalled pharmaceutical of the potential danger to the patients' lives.
Therefore, it is the object of the present invention to provide a medication guidance system that facilitates the proper administration of medication. The present invention is also useful for inventory management in hospital and other institutional settings. The present invention may be implemented as a cabinet or a mobile cart to store a multitude of medication in different compartments, wherein access to specific drawers of the cabinet is restricted to authorized personnel in order to control administration of the medication. When medication is administered to patients by authorized personnel, the administration of the medication doses is recorded by present invention and shared with the institution's database in order to maintain an inventory of the medication. This also prevents theft, as only authorized personnel are able to access medication within the present invention.
Furthermore, the present invention can be used to communicate with a designated caregiver (e.g. family member, nurse), physician, or pharmacist. This can be used to notify the caregiver, physician, or pharmacist when the user of the present invention does not acknowledge administration of a medication dose, cancels administration, or administers a dose that was cancelled by the physician or pharmacist. The present invention can also be used to request consultation or emergency consultation from the caregiver, physician, or pharmacist through the medication blister. Yet another communicable use of the present invention is the ability for the user to re-order medication by communicating with the physician or pharmacist through the medication blister cassette.
The invention also allows for remote inventory management unlike current methods which require authorized personnel to be present at the medication dispensing machines to manually check the inventory several times a day. It also notifies personnel if a diversion has occurred. Diversion of high value medications especially narcotics is a major financial, legal and safety burden on the health industry. By utilizing a computer vision analysis program, the present invention will immediately notify personnel if a case of diversion, such as unauthorized removal or removal of unauthorized number of medications has occurred thus bypassing human overseers.